Modely Josefa Winterhaldera staršího ve sbírkách Národní galerie v Praze

In the year 1933 two small carvings of St. Sebastian and St. Roch were loaned from the property of the Gallery of the Society of Patriotic Friends of Art in Prague for the jubilee exhibition of the Provincial Museum in Opava/Troppau. The works were originally regarded as anonymous, but the German art historian Werner Kudlich linked them to the Moravian sculptor Josef Winterhalder the Elder (1702–1769). The two statues were not made use of again in an exhibition until recent exhibitions of Czech Baroque art at the National Gallery in Prague. In spite of this, these high-quality works of art have escaped the notice of recent literature. Their size, the form of the pedestals, and the unusual care devoted to the modelling indicate that they were sample or contractual models for larger statues of the two saints. However, we have so far been unable to find corresponding examples in Winterhalder's extant work. A third sculptural work by Josef Winterhalder the Elder, representing St. John of Nepomuk (?), was purchased from the Kroměříž collection of Jaroslav Mathon after the Second World War. In this case, too, it is evident that it was intended as a model. Although the carving represents a different iconographic type of the saint, the possibility cannot be excluded that valuable evidence has here been preserved of an alternative composition for the central figure of the martyr who refused to betray the secret of the confessional from the stone memorial in front of the façade of the prelature building of the former Premonstratensian monastery in Hradisko near Olomouc.